"I tried to get a good job
with honest pay
might as well join the mob
the benefits are OK
standing in the sun
with a popsicle
everything is possible
with a lotta luck
and a pretty face
and some time to waste
leave without a trace, leave without a trace, leave without a trace..."
Soul Asylum, "Without A Trace", from the album Grave Dancer's Union
"Nostalgia is a denial of a painful present." - Paul, in the movie "Midnight In Paris"
In the car, right after work, stuck at a red light, flipping through my cds, looking for something I hadn't heard in awhile, and I spotted the Soul Asylum. Without even thinking about it I forwarded to the ninth song and let it rip. The opening chords brought me right back there, and I drifted back eighteen years...
The phone rang. I almost didn't pick it up; although it was only eight-thirty I had a good buzz on and I had a party to go to up on the fifth floor of my building. The party would mark the next day's inauguration of a new President, forty or fifty like-minded souls mostly in their twenties gathering together to celebrate the end of what we viewed as a decade-and-change long nightmare of Reagan and Bush. The times they were a-changin', or so we told ourselves, and we wanted to ring in the occasion. Against my better judgement, I picked up the ringing phone.
"Hello?" I asked, praying it wasn't one of my parents. I hated talking to my parents while lit back then; I hated faking sobriety, and I hated their pretending they couldn't discern my drunkenness even more.
"Dave!" I breathed a sigh of relief. I recognized the voice of Joe, my sister Deb's husband.
"What's up?" I asked. "I'm on my way out, I gotta party to go to actually, but..."
"Party on a Tuesday night, eh?" he laughed. He proceeded to inform me that my sister had given birth to a baby girl a few hours prior. They called her Emily. Emily Rose. Ha, I thought: my sister always loved that Faulkner story, "A Rose For Emily." Good for her, I thought; even if inadvertently, she had slipped a literary reference in there, and had given the child a fine name to boot.
Joe talked with great excitement about the labor and delivery, about what she looked liked. I couldn't get a word in edgewise. Which was fine with me; I sat in my bedroom on an old light-green and peach floral patterned swivel chair my Nana had given me, staring out the window at the street-scene below me, chain-smoking and nursing a beer or three.
She's beautiful he said, and I laughed and said, you know, Joe, that I think all babies look a little ugly when they first come out. He said, yeah, I know, but seriously, she's beautiful. He talked non-stop for an hour and a half. At one point my roommate, my boy Dan, my best friend in the world to this day, came into my bedroom and nodded his head in the direction of the fifth floor. I told him to go on ahead, told him I'd meet him up there.
I did, eventually.
I don't remember all that much about the party, but one thing sticks: one of the hosts hushed the crowd at one point, gathered the crowd around him in the living room. And he gave a toast to the new president, to the dawning of a new age. A toast to hope. We cheered him and raised our glasses and drained them, feeling like our time wandering the desert had ended. One of ours had taken the reins. Things would be different, we knew it. "A spring reborn in the world's oldest democracy," as the next day's speech would put it.
&&&
You certainly could have called me a slacker back then, and the label would have fit, as much as labels can; the term meant different things to different people and in the end, I suppose, it meant nothing more than just another marketing term, a word useful for selling plaid flannel shirts and bad beer and Candlebox by the time it all ended, but we believed we had something different going on. In my circle, at least, we saw it as a refusal to pledge allegiance to the flag of material achievement, to the empty promises of careerism and consumerism, to a culture of selfishness.
Dan and I lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood at least a couple of hundred years old, all brownstones and row houses and old apartment buildings. The place always had a faint smell of natural gas about it. Hardwood floors throughout, though. A galley kitchen, which was fine for me at the time, for I had only just begun to learn how to cook. I used to make the same dish all the time: ditalini pasta with cannellini beans and green peas, all mixed in with a jar of Pede Brothers (local!) marinara sauce. We'd sit and eat this concoction in the living room at what we called The Brady Bunch table, a circular thing with a white top and yellow lines around the outside edge. Dan's dad had scored it at a garage sale in the Catskills. The table held Dan's SONY cd player, from which we constantly blared music we loved, morning, noon and night. We didn't have a TV; we saw TV as part of the problem, to which music was the obvious antidote. The prior tenants for some reason had left a crutch behind; I mounted the crutch over the mantel of a long-dormant fireplace, and that passed for decor. The windows ran almost floor to ceiling and we never bothered with curtains; at night we'd turn off the lights, turn up the music, drink beer, smoke dope, and stare out those windows at the snow that fell almost endlessly through the winter of 1993. When home alone I would sit in the swivel chair and smoke and write shitty poems and lousy short stories and, mostly, stare off into to space and dream about my girl, about the future.
My job at the time was with a temp agency, of course; they'd hired me out to go copy every single trademark on file at the NY State Department of State building, conveniently located two blocks from the apartment. It was incredibly boring, but they let me wear a walkman while I did the work, which made it bearable. The smoke-room was conveniently located right near the copy machine, and I could more often than not be found in there, staring out the window, smoking Marlboro reds, and writing letters to the love of my life and my eventual bride and mother of my three children, who had gone back home to Britain a few weeks prior. The pay was, after taxes, $174 a week. If that sounds like a lot of money for those old days, well, it probably doesn't, and I can assure you, it wasn't. I was perpetually broke. Thankfully cigs were cheap back then, maybe a couple of bucks a pack, and I hadn't discovered the wonders of craft-brewed ales, Rolling Rock did the job nicely, thank you, but shit, I still never had any money. The rent took up close to two weeks' pay and it was all downhill from there. I leeched off Dan sometimes, brought empty bottles back other times; I used to walk four miles to the bank with my paycheck every Thursday just to save the bus fare.
Despite my membership in good standing in slackerdom, I would have taken "a good job with honest pay" in those days: I just couldn't find one. I was a kid, with no real skills and no real experience other than writing boring articles about small-town government meetings and garbage pick-up contracts and such. I didn't know shit from shinola, really, and the economy was in a bad place; it would be quite awhile before I joined the mob and got one of those good jobs with honest pay, and I was lucky to have fallen into one.
&&&
I played "Without A Trace" repeatedly until, without even realizing I had driven for twenty-five minutes, I found myself in the present, in my driveway, with the kids clamoring around the driver's side door.
That baby niece of mine is going off to college in a few weeks. At about the same time she leaves, I'll be welcoming my fourth child into the world. Forty five years old and having a baby, what the fuck am I thinking about, I think. I gotta have rocks in my head, knowing what I know about the way things are and where we're headed. Actually, things really aren't all that much different than they were in '93. Good jobs with honest pay are maybe even harder to come by, and though I got one at the moment, I'm holding my breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
And I still feel like I'm stuck in the wrong country, with the wrong people: for fuck's sake, just a few days ago a United States Senator stood on the floor of his chamber and had the unmitigated gall to say that the poor really need to start pulling their weight around here. Some days it sounds like "the quite force of progress" has gone completely silent, what with the bat-shit insane setting the agenda and the supposed opposition offering meek resistance.
So I'll excuse myself the trip down memory lane tonight, and in the car the other day. Maybe nostalgia is just a fierce denial of the urgency of now, but I have to think there's lessons in there, too. We were right about consumerism and careerism, weren't we? But it's more than that: nostalgia can't bring you back to better days, but looking back can remind you that there's no telling what lies ahead, and if things look grim, it's good sometimes to think about the fact that sometimes things wind up working out.